Chapter 74 — A Modern Day Buddhist
The Curve of Time, Chapter 74 —— A Modern Day Buddhist, in which Mica interviews Amara, the meditation guru.
Followed by reflections on double meaning.
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— 74 —
A Modern Day Buddhist
Mica checked the time on her phone as she held for Amara in the video conference waiting room, where she’d been assured that he would momentarily be. The thought of a technologically savvy Buddhist meditation master elicited in Mica a smile. Who would have thought it?
Unfortunately, she did. And, no sooner had she had the thought, than she shook her head, embarrassed at herself: a young journalist who didn’t stereotype before interviewing subjects would be just as surprising.
Then, Amara entered the room. Cushioned black velvet ovals cupped his ears, a modern commitment to their digital communion. The man had a presence.
They exchanged pleasantries, with Mica telling the Zen master that she was a journalist working on a story about meditation retreats. She figured that with Zeno dead, there would be no checking her story, so she told Amara that Zeno had mentioned the retreat to her. Moreover, he’d also mentioned a Charles——she made a show of checking his name——Belfry who had also attended. “Is it all rich old men?”
Mica hoped this might elicit mention of Molly, but instead, Amara screenshared a pic of his most recent cohort.
She recognized about half of the attendees from her online stalking that Charles’ social media had generated. But then——
“Oh,” Mica struggled to hide her surprise. Standing on the left of the photo Amara had shared was Saskia. “Oh, it’s an even mix, I guess,” she added, covering her shock, even as she snapped a screenshot.
Amara smiled, but said nothing.
“That woman on the left looks younger than the rest.”
“Sienna? Yes, probably your age.” Amara nodded. “Weekend retreats are, unfortunately, often cost-prohibitive for many younger disciples.”
Sienna? Mica nodded. She recalled Saskia’s middle name from back when she’d searched the birth records. Was Saskia being straight with her? To Amara, she said: “You could offer a discount to younger participants. A sort of time travel tax.” She watched the man’s eyes for a sign of recognition, but he closed them in apparent reflection, and a glistening spot on his bald pate distracted her.
When Amara looked up, he surprised her again: “The economics of enlightenment——borrow from our future selves.”
Mica cocked her head.
“Meditation is a view into alternate strands of the multiverse of our lives.”
“Sorry?” Had that been a veiled admission to an ability to tamper with the causal flow of time?
“When we look inward”——again Amara closed his eyes as he spoke, as if he were describing a vision behind his eyelids——“we see a new direction. Where, normally, we might walk east-west, meditation allows us to walk north-south.”
Mica blinked, recalling, and trying to reconcile, Amara’s words with Saskia’s description of time travel as adding a dimension to our perception of the universe.
“With experience,” Amara continued, “I can meander throughout the countryside.” He smiled at Mica, like a teacher. “Without meditation you live your life on a river. With meditation, you can transcend your path. Step off your canoe. See yourself from another vantage point, even a bridge passing over your traditional flow.”
Was this mindful sage describing time travel under the ostensible guise of meditation?
“With practice, we can visit two places at once. And one place twice. Seeing yourself from another angle.”
Mica wrestled with the coincidence of Amara’s words and the subtext she felt they were covering. Why was he deliberately speaking in riddles?
“Could you——” Mica started, before shifting direction. “Sounds like an outer body experience.”
Amara nodded gently. “Unfortunately, our time is up. I have other commitments I must attend to.”
“I’m sorry, I lost all track of time.” Or had Amara somehow shifted time, bringing Mica with him in a way that Saskia couldn’t?
They signed off, and Mica texted Dalton the screenshot she’d taken. She then raced down to the street below her apartment.
∞
LA had scant few oil execs, but it made sense that of the few it did have, some might have a residence in Brentwood. Happily, Charles Belfry was one and, earlier, he’d welcomed her over. She was running late now, but it was only a few short miles.
Mica whizzed past traffic in the green bike lane that flanked 17th Street. The extra oomph of her motorized bike made her smile as the wind tickled her red locks through the slits in her helmet. It was hardly a thrum between her legs, but silent electric motors had many virtues.
Questions cascaded through her mind. How much had to do with chance? Was everything really the deliberate manipulation of consequence?
About halfway across town Dalton called.
He was excited about a connection he’d just made. “Ever seen a guy with a birthmark on the front of his nose? And another on his forehead? Almost like he dipped his head face-first into a can of birthmark paint, but pulled back before he wet his eyes.”
“Yes.” Mica had.
“In the screenshot you sent me, right?”
“U-huh.”
“He just showed up dead in Seattle.”
“What?”
“You didn’t hear it from me.”
“Do you know who he is? Was?”
Well, that was chapter 74, Friends, I hope you enjoyed it!
The dialogue between Mica and Amara reminded me how often we have conversations in which the text has multiple interpretations. Usually it’s text and subtext, but sometimes it just feels like the world has multiple interpretations.
I’ve felt this a lot myself, recently, when talking about the milestones my youngest is passing through: high school graduation, turning 18, leaving home. Perhaps it’s that each of those is a marker of a time in life that occurs simultaneously, and, rather than hear the specifics, our minds glom onto the epoch that they refer to.
Secondarily, it may be that it isn’t always clear the level of specificity that one is referencing. This happens a lot in mathematics. Indeed, mathematicians often go to great lengths when proving something, to prove it in its most general context. This has the obvious advantage that subsequent uses of a truth can be most broadly applied without having to rework in the new context, but it also has the advantage that sometimes it is easier to prove a theorem in greater generality; the specifics of the case you are interested in can muddy the water.
I’m pretty sure there will be those of you listening who have not experienced the joys of generalized mathematical insights and might be skeptical of my claim that generality can be easier. So, as a cheat, I asked a few of the LLMs to remind me of some examples. The favored archetypal response is Fermat’s Little Theorem (not to be confused with Fermat’s Last Theorem, for which my PhD supervisor played a significant role in the proof of). Fermat’s Little Theorem states that: if you multiply any whole number by itself (p-1) times, where p is a prime, and then divide by p, you’ll always get a remainder of 1. And I can see how this might even sound esoteric, but it’s the sort of question number theorist love and it turns out to be incredibly useful to know. Still, explaining the general proof would rely on the development of a branch of mathematics called group theory, and probably takes us too far afield here.
On the bright side, Google’s LLM, Gemini, gave me a wonderful simple example of a question that is easier answered by considering a more general case, the initial question being: how many breaks does it take to separate a 5 x 8 chocolate bar into 1x1 squares? The utility of this question should be far more self-evident, while at first blush the answer seems far from obvious. Here’s the more general trick though: how would this change for an m x n chocolate bar? Pause. Have a think for a moment. Go on. Really, stop. Alright, you’re back? The key observation is that it sometimes helps to reframe the way you are thinking about your question. In this case, the critical insight is to notice what happens to the number of components you have after each break … specifically, that they increase by one. That is each time you make a break you have one extra component. So if we start with one component, the whole chocolate bar, and we want to end up with m x n components, each 1 x 1, then we’ll need (mn - 1) breaks. Brilliant, huh! 39 breaks for our 5 x 8 bar.
Circling back to the chapter of my daughter’s life that is closing, I realize that beyond the multiple interpretations I gave above, there is another; more of a corollary, detailing the implications for my own life. Specifically, that after 20 years with kids in the house my wife and I are about to be empty nesters!
Whatever interpretation I look at, I’m excited and curious to see what the next stage holds for everyone.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
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